NASA has awarded Impossible Sensing with SBIR funding for our proposal to develop an innovative lidar instrument using a new optoelectronics concept for Earth Compact lidar for Height and altitude Observations (GRAAL).
GRAAL is an ultra-compact time-of-flight ranging lidar for Earth observation from Low Earth Orbit (LEO), designed to address key observational priorities including ice sheet thickness, forest canopy thickness, and smoke and cloud cover.
GRAAL's optical path inherently provides a dual-channel capability for multi-sensor configurations such as imaging + lidar or hyperspectral sensing + lidar.
With our advances, GRAAL will be a key enabling technology for the next decade of compact lidar systems tasked with providing high quality data while vastly reducing instrument cost, size, and complexity. Beyond space applications, GRAAL has potential to enable balloon-based platforms for monitoring of greenhouse gas emission in oil & gas settings. Here, GRAAL is a key technology to allow companies to respond to new regulations for monitoring emissions at all stages of production.
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